GEO BON projects

The French Biodiversity Observation Network ECOSCOPE

The BON ECOSCOPE, a national research infrastructure called “biodiversity (meta)data hub”, organizes its Users’ Forum on April 26th 2017, in Paris. The Forum will gather researchers, protected areas managers and policy-decision makers to discuss Products & Services – those already existing and sharable and those missing that we should develop – needed by biodiversity data users to improve knowledge, the understanding of the state and the dynamic of biodiversity and the decision basis. National and EU BONs, as well as research infrastructures (RIs) are invited to present their latests developments and all participants are invited to express their needs, from mining of heterogeneous and scattered data to linking with others communities (climate data, health and social sciences…). This day will be followed by a workshop dedicated to the brand new ECOSCOPE metadata portal (in english of course !) to collect feed-back to improve the tool. Two others major actions will mark this year for the French BON: a scientific congress gathering biodiversity data producers (academic and non academic) around questions related to biodiversity monitoring at national scale, EBVs, indicators and observation at ecosystem level & a joint action with CNRS (IMBE) and GBIF (Fr.) about graphs approach to investigate complex research question and to mine and visualize data. More information is coming in spring ! Questions & wishes to participate can be addressed to the team at ecoscope@fondationbiodiversite.fr

Moreover, several national initiatives are completing a major steps in their activities or are starting their actions:

– A new Observation and Experimentation System dedicated to phenology (EBVs) is born. Called TEMPO, it goes further monitoring the state and dynamics of seasonal rhythms of living organisms and aims at understanding and predicting how climate change impacts the phenology and its consequences in terms of system productivity, survival and population distribution.

– The national research infrastructure AgroBRCs deals with agronomic, biological and genetics (EBVs) resources for research and covers plants and crops, forests, domesticated animals, micro-organisms, soil and environmental resources, in compliance with the Nagoya Protocol. Two portals to access to crops and animals collections are opening within the next weeks.

Finally, a significant event of the beginning of this year concerns ECOSCOPE: it is the creation of the “French Biodiversity Agency”, which brings together areas and species managers. The exchange with the scientific and academic community is engaged through the “Foundation for Research on Biodiversity” (which hosts the French BON) on research and information systems. This should improve the dialogue between “environment” and “research”, especially the coordination and the delivery of biodiversity observations and related services to users!